Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation: A selection of material from the essays submitted in the competition for the Eugene Higgins prize of $5,000Bird, J. Malcolm (James Malcolm)
Philosophy
Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation: A selection of material from the essays submitted in the competition for the Eugene Higgins prize of $5,000
Bird, J. Malcolm (James Malcolm)
Relativity (Physics)
The objection will be urged that the mathematician who does all
this usurps the place of the logician. A little reflection will
show this not to be the case. The logician in fact occupies the same
position with reference to the geometer that the geometer occupies
with reference to the physicist, the chemist, the arithmetician,
the engineer, or anybody else whose primary interest lies with some
particular set of elements to which the geometer's system applies. The
mathematician is the tool-maker of all science, but he does not make
his own tools--these the logician supplies. The logician in turn
never descends to the actual practice of rigorous thinking, save as
he must necessarily do this in laying down the general procedures
which govern rigorous thinking. He is interested in processes, not
in their application. He tells us that if a proposition is true its
converse may be true or false or ambiguous, but its contrapositive
is always true, while its negative is always false. But he never,
from a particular proposition "If A is B then C is D," draws the
particular contrapositive inference "If C is not D then A is not
B." That is the mathematician's business.
THE RÔLE OF GEOMETRY
The mathematician is the quantity-production man of science. In
his absence, the worker in each narrower field where the elements
under discussion take particular concrete forms could work out,
for himself, the propositions of the logical structure that applies
to those elements. But it would then be found that the engineer had
duplicated the work of the physicist, and so for many other cases;
for the whole trend of modern science is toward showing that the
same background of principles lies at the root of all things. So the
mathematician develops the fabric of propositions that follows from
this, that and the other group of assumptions, and does this without
in the least concerning himself as to the nature of the elements of
which these propositions may be true. He knows only that they are true
for any elements of which his assumptions are true, and that is all he
needs to know. Whenever the worker in some particular field finds that
a certain group of the geometer's assumptions is true for his elements,
the geometry of those elements is ready at hand for him to use.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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